Bailey comforts Cristina
by sucker-for-a-romcom
Summary: Another one-shot look at the friendship between my favourite two Grey's characters. Set during 5x18 when Cristina has just revealed Izzie's cancer.


**Straight after 5x18**

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Dr Bailey and Dr Yang were the only ones left in the scrub room. The patient had been taken to recovery, Karev had rushed off in a frenzy and everyone else had finished up.

Cristina was still meticulously scrubbing at her hands. Carefully going over every part of every fingers.

Miranda was in a complete daze, barely able to focus on the sink in front of her. Still consumed with Cristina's revelation from earlier.

"_Izzie has stage 4 metastatic cancer and she's resisting treatment."_

If Bailey ever had any doubts over Cristina's abilities as a surgeon they were firmly put to rest after watching the precise, textbook solo-surgery she performed despite the unbelievable tension.

Bailey's head had been running in furious circles and Alex had looked in complete shock but Cristina had been able to put everything aside in order to operate.

That was the measure of a great surgeon, the disassociation from everything else when in the OR.

"I'm a robot."

It was said as a whisper and at first Bailey was afraid she had imagined it. She had been so consumed in her own thoughts she was surprised to hear Cristina speak. Then after realising what Yang had said she started to worry she had been thinking out loud.

After Bailey said nothing, Cristina continued "Izzie said I don't like her. Right before she told me, she said I don't like her and now I can't remember if she's right or not."

"Because she's sick?" Miranda was surprised at how low and strained her own voice sounded compared to her normal confident tone.

"She almost ruined my first solo surgery."

Bailey sighed and was suddenly very tired. She was already exhausted with how painful this was and was going to be. How she knew this would last for the foreseeable future and how every part of their lives would be filled with this. She wished it were yesterday.

"People don't very often bother figuring out if they like or dislike their family."

Cristina didn't say anything in response and Bailey wondered if Yang had even heard what she said. But they were a family all right – her interns – and it was going to make the situation all the more complicated.

She remembered how quickly it had happened. How within the first few weeks they were already thick as thieves, in each other's business and causing trouble. She had been irritated by the drama but had also felt a kind of envy for what they had.

Miranda had spent so much of her residency feeling alone. Looking down at her hands, she was reminded how often she felt lonely in her own marriage. In fact, in the past few years, the people in this hospital had become more of a family to her than the people outside of it. The surgical staff of Seattle Grace were her people and she loved them, no matter how much they bugged her. And now one of them was sick.

"It's not about like," she was speaking mostly to herself as she still wasn't sure if Cristina was listening "it's about love."

She looked across and saw Cristina's hands were turning red due to the incessant scrubbing.

Bailey watched as she scrubbed ever more violently at her hands and began muttering under her breath.

"I'm a ROBOT. I'm a robot? I'M a robot?"

Then Cristina seemed to burst with all the emotion she had kept pushed down in the OR. She threw the scrub brush in the sink, turned to face Bailey, pulled off her cap and threw her hands out to the sides.

"I'M A ROBOT?"

Her face looked wild and angry and absolutely terrified.

"I lay next to her on that cold bathroom floor after Denny died. And I'm a _robot_?"

"I helped her steal a heart for the man. Steal. A human organ! I went against a system I believe in. Risked everything I have ever worked for, my whole career, for _her _boyfriend and then I sat the fake Shiva with her after it all went wrong and Burke got shot and they rolled Denny away to the morgue."

Miranda closed her eyes against the memories of every bad thing that happened in the recent past. She wanted to be somewhere else. She wanted to be at home, smelling the top of Tuck's head or in an OR far away, removing a gall bladder. She couldn't bear the sadness, the desperation in Cristina's voice.

"She was there at my wedding. She was stood beside me when Burke…" Cristina's voice crackled and she was suddenly quieter. "She cleared the church, sent people home, got rid of the flowers... And now I'm a robot."

"Cristina…" Bailey made her first attempt at trying to say something profound. Something that would help. She came up with nothing.

Instead Dr Yang turned back to the sink and gripped the edge until her knuckles were white, her elbows locked, head down, she seemed to be chanting.

"I'm a robot? I'm a robot? I'm a robot?"

Soon her rhetorical question had turned to an affirmation. **"I am a robot."** She was growing louder and louder seemingly willing herself to become an emotionless android.

"I am a robot. I am a robot. I am a robot. I am a…"

And then her elbows buckled and she hunched over the sink shaking, the room echoing with her sobs.

Bailey felt bewildered. She liked to think she was a capable woman but faced with a crying Cristina Yang she felt helpless.

Eventually, when Cristina showed no signs of calming down, she walked to the young doctor's side, placed her arms around her and squeezed tight.

She was of course reminded of the time not so long ago when she and Yang had both done this for Dr Dixon - suppression of the nervous system, decreased pulse rate, decrease metabolic rate - nice medical reasons for the calming affect of a hug.

This felt different.

This was not medical - it was human. Desperate human emotion. Miranda was clinging onto Cristina like she was clinging onto her own life.

Cristina was calmer but she was still sobbing and as they stood there, Miranda's mind wandered…

Random assignment. Interns were randomly assigned to residents. This is what they were told. Despite the Chief's protests, Bailey had never fully believed this.

It felt too big a coincidence that as the only female to receive interns in her year she had been given 3 of the program's 6 women. She'd heard the other residents gossip to. They complained that she got the intern with the highest incoming test scores and she'd got Ellis Grey's daughter; they said it was the Chief showing his favouritism.

She sometimes wondered if the Chief had known the challenge he'd given her with this bunch or if any resident would now lament her getting the highest-test-scorer considering she was currently hyperventilating over a scrub sink.

At times it had felt like a punishment: Her interns. They had broken just about every rule the hospital set. They broke rules no one had ever even thought to set. They slept with attendings, slept with each other, fell in love with patients, stole organs, stuck their hand in bomb-filled body cavities, failed exams and gave everyone syphilis. Alex hadn't even been originally assigned to her!

She remembered listening to Dr. Gupta, a fellow resident, talk about his interns. He said they logged appropriate OR and study hours. They took direction, took orders. They had their own lives that they went home to. Dr Gupta was never informed of illegal autopsies being performed by his interns. Dr Gupta went golfing. He didn't have to spend half his life worrying about a bunch of over-excited, scalpel happy, buffoons who might be running off to get married in Vegas.

But then again…

Dr Gupta only had 2 of his original 4 interns left in the program. One had switched to anaesthesia specialty and one had moved to a less competitive program at another hospital.

In fact, Bailey was the only one left with all her interns. Other residents had interns dropout and switch specialties and transfer, but not her. Sure O'Malley had repeated and Izzie had been AWOL for a while but they were still here. They all were. And despite everything, they were good. They performed open-heart surgery in elevators, drilled burr holes on crashed ferryboats, conducted massive clinical trials, they created intern contests, they pulled off taking over the workload of the head of cardio and they stuck their hand bomb-filled body cavities.

They were messy and dysfunctional but they were good – the best – and they were hers. Dr freakin' Bailey's interns.

So, she thought, maybe it wasn't random assignment, maybe it was something closer to fate.

She instinctively squeezed Cristina tighter at her revelation and heard a big intake of breath and then silence as Dr Yang finally seemed to stop crying. Miranda took in her own big breath and turned Cristina to face her, making sure her hands were still holding the girl's arms to stop her trying to escape.

"Cristina you are not a robot. You are a person. You are a person who is feeling sad because one of your people is sick. And that is ok. But you are also a Doctor. A damn fine doctor who wants to find a way to fix this medical problem. But Cristina, you cannot fix this. You can't fix Izzie. You don't have to. You told us. Now we know and now we can face this together. Not as doctors or as robots but as people."

Miranda stared at the bloodshot eyes looking back at her, seeing the lost little girl beneath the surgeon exterior and hoped Cristina would hear her. She was about to let go when Cristina whispered something. Something that Bailey could hardly believe would come from those lips, something that would get her through some of the darkest nights to follow.

"_Together."_

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_**So that kind of descended into a sappy ending, but I couldn't help myself****!**** x**_  
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